Dept. of Aptitude (w/Alexandra Robbins)

Talk story about the writer’s discovery of Republican Presidential front-runner George W. Bush’s confidential school records when he attended Yale... all the fuss in New Haven may be an overreaction, to judge from a copy of the academic file that not long ago found its way here. Bush, after all, has never claimed Phi Beta Kappa membership or an internship at Partisan Review. He told the Washington Post’s Lois Romano that if he ever dared to call himself “an intellectual” his friends would immediately “start laughing” at him. The college records merely confirm what Bush has already conceded. According to the Yale document, Bush was a C student... In the end, George W. may be marked for the White House because of, rather than in spite of, his mediocre grades. Historically, there is no correlation between academic achievement and success in the Oval Office. Some of the nation’s most fiercely intelligent presidents, including Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Jimmy Carter, ran troubled administrations; two of the century’s most influential presidents were also among the least academically distinguished—Ronald Reagan did just well enough at Eureka College to keep his football scholarship, and Franklin Roosevelt coasted through Harvard with gentleman’s C’s. So it’s hard to know if the student is really father to the president...

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